Rickard Green is a senior specialist in muticore/multiprocessor utilization and scalability at Ericsson AB. He works with the development of Erlang's virtual machine at Erlang/OTP and has done so for the past ten years. The development of an Erlang VM capable of utilizing multicore/multiprocessor hardware, i.e. the SMP support of the Erlang VM, begun about five years ago. He has since then been the main developer of the SMP support, and has designed and implemented major parts of it.

Rickard Green is Giving the Following Talks

Future Extensions to the Native Interface

The NIF interface introduced in R14 has made it easier to interface native code. It also interfaces native code more efficiently than using a linked in driver. However, making it easier to interface native code also made it easier to destroy the responsiveness of the system by blocking the system for long periods of time. It is also hard to take advantage of the efficiency of the NIF interface in all situations,since it lacks the ability to easily handle externally triggered I/O events.

During this talk we will look closer at planned future extensions to the existing native interface. These extensions will make it easier to write and/or integrate existing native code without destroying the responsiveness of the system. They will also make it easier to utilize the efficiency of the NIF interface in situations where a linked in driver previously was the only option.

Target audience: Anyone interested in the runtime system of Erlang, and especially people writing linked in drivers, or NIF libraries.

Talk Objectives: To give the audience some insights into planned future improvements of the native interface.